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Listening recommendations from the past, present, Portland and the periphery.
SOMETHING OLD
After listening to The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's Now I Got Worry, I wondered why rock's forward trajectory seemed to stall in the late '90s—why mixing feral sex-freak rockabilly with rap beats felt so much more intuitive 25 years ago than it does now. I was tempted to blame the '00s post-punk revivalists for rock's sad present state, but then I heard Franz Ferdinand blasting from a restaurant and had much more utopian thoughts.
SOMETHING NEW
Chemtrails at the Country Club is the Lana Del Rey album for people who don't like Lana Del Rey. Cherry-pie kitsch and classic-rock references are out the door, and these 11 tracks sound like a gentle breeze blowing across a field of grain. For the first time ever, her music gives us a sense of America as the inconceivably vast place we see in Westerns rather than just a loaded concept. "White Dress" is the best song she's ever written.
SOMETHING LOCAL
Laura Veirs' first new single since last year's My Echo features two interpretations of a Rainer Maria Rilke poem, "The Panther," one set to ukulele and another to guitar. Both instruments are treated with splendid, Arthur Russell-like distortion that gives the compositions a sense of place and conjures images much more vivid than you'd expect from a person alone with an instrument. The cover art is by a local artist, too—Anisa Makhoul's big cat is indeed fearful, even if it's not quite symmetrical.
SOMETHING ASKEW
Florian T M Zeisig loops bits of Enya's 1988 mega-seller Watermark into disembodied elven madrigals on his new album, You Look So Serious. If you ever wanted to listen to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack without all the Uruk-hai war marches killing the vibe, this is the album for you. The title suggests this is somehow a comment on irony and musical taste, though it would be braver if he acted like Enya was never a joke in the first place.
